As the holiday season approaches, online shoppers will spend an average of £286 on presents for their loved ones. Spotlight your products and services, to maximise visibility throughout the busy present-hunting period.
However, competition in online retail is fierce. With multiple retailers bidding on the same keywords, organic visibility is key to help you break through the noise. Harnessing organic search traffic is the foundation of a successful eCommerce website.
Our digital marketing experts have recommended 4 key areas to optimise your online product listings ahead of the holiday season. It is important that your SEO strategy is targeted for both automated search crawlers and for the end user. Google may rank your pages highly, but relevant and helpful content is key to convincing a customer to click and ultimately buy your offerings.
Here are our 4 key areas of focus to supercharge sales ahead of the holiday season:
Audit Audit Audit: Identify quick wins for SEO
Take time to plan your SEO strategy, before the holiday season really kicks off in November, with Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Take a full audit of your site to check that everything is where it should be and to prioritise your SEO aims for this busy period. Some opportunities for optimising your site and enhancing its visibility after this audit are:
- Correcting title tags and meta descriptions
- Highlighting essential microdata
- Implementing internal linking
- Updating your xml sitemap
By auditing your site before the holiday rush, you can fix any potential issues and ensure your products or services will be seen by the right people, at the right time. If you'd rather a DIY approach, Backlinko have an extensive audit checklist to keep you busy from now until Christmas 2020.
Customise Page Content: Champion relevant keywords and page titles
Target high volume search terms by including seasonal keywords and product descriptors in your page titles and meta descriptions. Optimising this limited number of characters with keywords will help your page to rank higher and engage with more search traffic.
For example, you may update listing pages to include holiday-relevant language for users searching for 'Christmas gifts for girls'. Alternatively, if you know a certain colour is trending this season, you may want to add this attribute to your page titles to gain more traffic.
Superdrug features seasonal landing pages. The website focuses on terms like 'Christmas gifts 2019' as winter comes closer.
Superdrug seasonal landing page
Your H1 tags tell the user and Google what your page is about. As such, each title should be distinct and relevant to its page. A common mistake is to set the company name as a site-wide H1. differentiating each page title will make it clear where to find certain information and help customers down the path to purchase.
Make use of reviews: Include Social proof in your SERPS
Using third-party review tools, like Feefo or Reevoo, will build a trustworthy site appearance. Positive ratings will demonstrate to potential customers that your site is safe and secure. What’s more, integrating these reviews into product pages provides each page with unique content.
Nintendo utilising product reviews from Reevoo
Product pages are often at risk of featuring duplicate content across different SKUs on your site. If you are selling a third-party brand, you may risk duplication across any number of other websites as well. Including customer reviews is a great way of sourcing fresh, relevant and original content for each of your product pages. Unique, relevant content on each page ultimately improves their position and click-through rate on Google search results.
Schemas and Data Highlighter: Help Google to read your pages
Schema is a code tag which identifies key details for search engines. Not only can Schema markup help search engines to understand your page’s content better, but it can even change how your listings appear in search results as shown below!
Schema enabling Google to show reviews, cooking times, and images.
Using this microdata, Google can pull through star ratings, reviews, prices and other details. Specific schema designed for product pages highlights the most relevant details for prospective shoppers. Note that you will require development resource for the implementation of this feature. Get in touch if this is something you would like to implement in your eCommerce project.
If you don't have development resource to implement your schema markup, there is a quick and easy method of applying it yourself. The Data Highlighter tool in Google Search Console plays a similar role to schema, foregrounding key data sets.
Using Data Highlighter, you can highlight sections of your product pages to teach Google to recognise patterns on your page outlines. This includes highlighting the price, name, and image of your product. By following this easy and consistent template, Google will re-apply the tags across your entire site. This means that you only need to apply Data Highlighter to a few pages and Google will tag additional existing and future pages for you.
An introduction to Data Highlighter
Get in touch with our digital marketing experts for an SEO audit of your eCommerce site and an SEO roadmap to prepare your site for the holiday season.
